Contact centers are widely used by companies and service organizations to allow a user to purchase and/or obtain customer support for products and services. Agents staff the contact center and provide sales or support information on various products and services. A user may make a communication to the contact center through a variety of modes of communication; for example, the user may make a telephone call or send an email to the contact center or connect on line when on a company's web site. An automated system of the contact center receives the in-bound communication or contact and routes the communication or contact to an agent. The contact center may also initiate outbound communications or contacts to a user.
For example, the contact center may contact a user via an outbound communication and then contact an available agent when the user responds to the communication, thereby creating a connection between the agent and the user.
Contact centers are under pressure to minimize costs and time on hold by users while providing answers to users' questions in a convenient manner. In addition, contact centers do not receive user requests for information in regular intervals. During peak periods of user requests, the contact center may have to place the user on hold in a queue of the contact center until an agent currently handling other requests is available to respond to the user on hold. During periods of reduced user requests, the contact center must deal with the increased cost of agents sitting idle. The contact centers have to balance the cost of overstaffing with the reduced convenience to users that must be placed on hold.
To help alleviate the irregular patterns of user requests, contact centers have provided users with information associated with the current wait time of user requests waiting in a queue of the contact center. Contact centers have also recorded user information and placed a call back to the user by the agent when an agent is available. However, this method does not always successfully re-contact a user, who may have moved to a different location with a different telephone number or method of communication.
As an example, a user may contact a contact center from their home telephone number and receive a message about excessive wait time. Later that day, the user may call back from their cell phone or work phone or via another method of communication, such as text message or e-mail. Contact centers currently cannot link or create an association between these two contacts together.
Based on the foregoing, it is apparent that there is a need for a system and method to provide a user with the ability to re-contact the contact center via a second or subsequent communication means or method as described below, which enables the user to regain their original position in the hold queue. The re-contact can be made by any method, including but not limited to telephone, e-mail, Instant Message (IM), Text Message (TM), Short Message Service (SMS) or SMS voice. Also it is apparent there is a need for a method and system that determines the user's status in the queue and provides the user with the option of providing a communications connection with an agent, regardless of the type of communication employed by the user.
Additionally, it is common that a user is placed in the wrong queue initially and after the determination is made that the user is in the wrong queue, the user is transferred to a second queue. If all agents are busy in the second queue, then the hold time for the second queue commences. A user would be stuck waiting in a first queue and a second queue, thereby incurring two separate wait times. Additionally, the user who is placed into a second queue must start the on hold process all over again once placed in the correct hold queue. Therefore there is a need for the contact center system to identify the first hold time in the first queue and link the user's place in the first hold queue with the second hold queue, in order to be able to advance or compensate the user once positioned in the second queue.